The power of peer advantage

“I don’t have time.”

We hear and repeat that phrase a lot. As a business leader, you’re pulled in a million different directions and face a million different challenges every day. Sometimes, it seems like the last thing you can fit in your schedule is a Vistage meeting. But you do anyway because creating the space needed to work through some of those challenges is critical to your business continuing to move forward.

As I travel across the country to our Vistage Executive Summits this year, interacting with our many members, I hear so many inspiring stories of how our groups are making an impact. No matter what the makeup of the group, our peers are there to provide a sounding board for making tough decisions or help to navigate through times of uncertainty.

This was exactly the case for Deb Erickson, whose performance apparel business has grown exponentially over the last 25 years. But with the success came challenges, like managing the costs of running a larger operation. By asking questions, providing guidance and holding her accountable, Erickson’s Vistage group is helping her through all of it.

Deb is one of many members whose stories we’re celebrating through our new core values campaign, which marks our crossing the 20,000-member milestone.  Our values of trust, growth, challenge and caring are recurring themes throughout the stories and underlying all of them is the power of peer advantage.

As Laura Richardson struggled with taking over the family company from her mother, the open dialogue she could have and the environment of trust was invaluable.

When Yu-Gene Liew decided to grow his company’s snack foods operation by expanding its product line, he was fortunate to have his Vistage peers with him because they would ask challenging questions that would force him to think about whether increasing capacity would devalue his brand.

These are the stories that define what Vistage stands for and illustrate why we believe so much in the power of peer advantage. I hope you’ll check back here frequently as we continue highlighting our members throughout the fall.

3880 views